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Reba McEntire is your new Colonel Sanders, and maybe 2018 won't be so bad.

Fast food fried chicken juggernaut KFC has cast a new actor to play Colonel Sanders: Reba McEntire.

Yeah, this Reba McEntire.

Photo by Charley Gallay/Getty Images for Celebrity Fight Night.


Only for this role, she looks a little more like this.

Image via KFC/YouTube.

McEntire donned the signature white suit and string tie to perform a tongue in cheek song as everyone's second ,favorite fried chicken purveyor. (I'm an Annie from Popeye's stan, now and forever.)

"I’m Colonel Sanders, the same as always,” she sings. "I swear I'm not a famous woman!”

Several male actors have portrayed the Colonel, including Rob Lowe, Norm MacDonald, Ray Liotta, and Jim Gaffigan. But this is the first time the company's founder has been portrayed by a woman or a musician. McEntire was chosen specifically for the role because of her Southern roots (she's from Oklahoma) and legend status in country music. She'll appear in television spots for the chain's Smoky Mountain BBQ chickenthrough April.

So the internet had absolutely nothing to say about all of this and that's the end of this charming and delightful story, right?

Hold on to your biscuits, folks.

Loyal Colonel Sanders supporters, confused followers, and former fans of KFC voiced their displeasure at the decision on social media.

Who knew people were invested in which actors are selected to portray this Southern icon? But apparently, they are.

Some were turned off by the idea of a woman playing a man.

Others were skeptical, but open to change.

But for the most part, people had some fun with it. After all, we're talking about fast food chicken, here.

For instance: What might a woman playing Colonel Sanders have to put up with?

And then there's this tweet, which is funny (and a little bit sad) because it's true.

Others, particularly fans of McEntire, were pretty pleased with the decision. Who wouldn't want to see one of their faves break the dredged and breaded ceiling?

While this a very small, silly thing to choose to complain or cheer about, it's not completely insignificant.

In 2018, women are still breaking barriers, both large and important and small and crispy. This week alone, Rachel Morrison became the first woman to be nominated for an Academy Award in cinematography. Sen. Tammi Duckworth announced her pregnancy and will be the first senator to give birth in office. And on Sunday at the Grammy's, we may see Cardi B become first woman ever to earn the award for Best Rap Song and Best Rap Performance.

And yeah, people like Hec have a point.

A female Colonel Sanders probably wasn't the first thing people participating in the Women's March had in mind. Women have made some serious moves, but when it comes to improving representation, earning equal wages, confronting gender based violence, or sexual misconduct, we have a long way to go.

Then again, every first, even a seemingly silly one, is a chicken-fried step in the right direction.

A pitbull stares at the window, looking for the mailman.


Dogs are naturally driven by a sense of purpose and a need for belonging, which are all part of their instinctual pack behavior. When a dog has a job to do, it taps into its needs for structure, purpose, and the feeling of contributing to its pack, which in a domestic setting translates to its human family.

But let’s be honest: In a traditional domestic setting, dogs have fewer chores they can do as they would on a farm or as part of a rescue unit. A doggy mom in Vancouver Island, Canada had fun with her dog’s purposeful uselessness by sharing the 5 “chores” her pitbull-Lab mix does around the house.

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Representative Image from Canva

Let's not curse any more children with bad names, shall we?

Some parents have no trouble giving their children perfectly unique, very meaningful names that won’t go on to ruin their adulthood. But others…well…they get an A for effort, but might want to consider hiring a baby name professional.

Things of course get even more complicated when one parent becomes attached to a name that they’re partner finds completely off-putting. It almost always leads to a squabble, because the more one parent is against the name, the more the other parent will go to bat for it.

This seemed to be the case for one soon-to-be mom on the Reddit AITA forum recently. Apparently, she was second-guessing her vehement reaction to her husband’s, ahem, avant garde baby name for their daughter, which she called “the worst name ever.”

But honestly, when you hear this name, I think you’ll agree she was totally in the right.

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An English doctor named Edward Jenner took incredible risks to try to rid his world of smallpox. Because of his efforts and the efforts of scientists like him, the only thing between deadly diseases like the ones below and extinction are people who refuse to vaccinate their kids. Don't be that parent.

Unfortunately, because of the misinformation from the anti-vaccination movement, some of these diseases have trended up in a really bad way over the past several years.

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Going on a cruise can be an incredible getaway from the stresses of life on the mainland. However, that doesn’t mean there isn’t an element of danger when living on a ship 200-plus feet high, traveling up to 35 miles per hour and subject to the whims of the sea.

An average of about 19 people go overboard every year, and only around 28% survive. Cruise ship lawyer Spencer Aronfeld explained the phenomenon in a viral TikTok video, in which he also revealed the secret code the crew uses when tragedy happens.

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Kudos to the heroes who had 90 seconds to save lives in the Key Bridge collapse

The loss of 6 lives is tragic, but the dispatch recording shows it could have been so much worse.

Representative image by Gustavo Fring/Pexels

The workers who responded to the Dali's mayday call saved lives with their quick response.

As more details of the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse in Baltimore emerge, it's becoming more apparent how much worse this catastrophe could have been.

Just minutes before 1:30am on March 26, shortly after leaving port in Baltimore Harbor, a cargo ship named Dali lost power and control of its steering, sending it careening into a structural pillar on Key Bridge. The crew of the Dali issued a mayday call at 1:26am to alert authorities of the power failure, giving responders crucial moments to prepare for a potential collision. Just 90 seconds later, the ship hit a pylon, triggering a total collapse of the 1.6-mile bridge into the Patapsco River.

Dispatch audio of those moments shows the calm professionalism and quick actions that limited the loss of life in an unexpected situation where every second counted.

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Yale's pep band had to miss the NCAA tournament. University of Idaho said, 'We got you.'

In an act of true sportsmanship, the Vandal band learned Yale's fight song, wore their gear and cheered them on.

Courtesy of University of Idaho

The Idaho Vandals answered the call when Yale needed a pep band.

Yale University and the University of Idaho could not be more different. Ivy League vs. state school. East Coast vs. Pacific Northwest. City vs. farm town. But in the first two rounds of the NCAA basketball tournament, extenuating circumstances brought them together as one, with the Bulldogs and the Vandals becoming the "Vandogs" for a weekend.

When Yale made it to the March Madness tournament, members of the school's pep band had already committed to other travel plans during spring break. They couldn't gather enough members to make the trek across the country to Spokane, Washington, so the Yale Bulldogs were left without their fight song unless other arrangements could be made.

When University of Idaho athletic band director Spencer Martin got wind of the need less than a week before Yale's game against Auburn, he sent out a message to his band members asking if anyone would be interested in stepping in. The response was a wave of immediate yeses, so Martin got to work arranging instruments and the students dedicated themselves to learning Yale's fight song and other traditional Yale pep songs.

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